Cruising back to Seward

Alaska Travelog #14
Asea in Resurrection Bay - Sun, 16 Jun 2024, 5:30pm

Our day cruise to Kenai Fjords made good time on the trip back to Seward. Partly that was to make up time for losing an hour to engine trouble in the morning. Partly it was because we'd already seen a lot of wildlife in the morning, too. I mean, we saw a bald eagle before leaving the marina, playful sea otters a few minutes later, and a breaching humpback whale not long after that. (In fact, the captain speculated that it was during all these stops that seaweed got into the cooling intake and gummed up the works.) Later we saw killer whales and a bunch of different birds. On the way back, already late, we did stop for another pair of humpbacks. One was a juvenile who seemed to be literally jumping for joy. Unfortunately none of my photos or videos of this turned out as good as I hoped. Just catching good views of whales is tough; getting good photos of them is even more difficult.



One of the crew amused me with an annotated chart of where we'd gone and what we'd seen during the cruise. Well, he didn't do it just to amuse me. He did it to amuse everyone. I think I was the only one who liked it, though. 😅

As we steamed back toward Seward I watched the views out the windows. It was miles and miles of snow-capped mountains, some with glaciers, on both sides of Resurrection Bay.



Heres' a photo of Seward as we approach it from the west (above).



And this is a photo looking north at Seward. This is what's behind our hotel. See the view looking across the bay from our hotel in my Saturday night blog.

In almost any other place mountain views like these would be wondrous. Here they're so abundant they've became almost hum-drum. As much fun as this cruise has been, we'll be happy to be back on dry land in a few minutes.

Dead Battery, Worthless Car Rental Company

Alaska Travelog #15
Seward - Sun, 16 Jun 2024, 8:30pm

We got back from our day-long cruise to Kenai Fjords to an unpleasant surprise. Our car battery was dead. Well, not our car but our rental car. I'd thought the battery seemed weak the past two days when the starter motor seemed to turn sluggishly. Now it was completely dead— no lights, nothing.

If this were our car, we'd call AAA and be confident of what'd happen next. It's for situations like this that we've paid for AAA membership for over 25 years. But this was a rental car, so I called the rental company's roadside assistance hotline.

Avis was a complete waste of time. Long story short, I had to make two calls to them. Each took about 20 minutes. And at the end of nearly 45 minutes I had nothing. I'd have had to make a third call to get help.

• The first agent couldn't even find our contract. I hung up on him when it was obvious he hadn't figured out, yet wouldn't admit he hadn't figured it out, and also told me there'd be a penalty fee for them sending out a truck to jump-start the battery. "You're going to charge me extra for your busted car?" I shouted. "I'm the one losing my weekend to your busted car, you should be paying me!"
• The call with the second Avis agent started better— he at least was able to find my contract in the system, recognizing that Alaska has different ID numbers than the rest of the US— but after 20 minutes realized that he wouldn't be able to dispatch a truck anywhere in Alaska. Why couldn't that have been established in the first minute, when I clearly told him this was an Alaska rental and I was in Alaska?
• Also, the second agent confirmed that if, if, he were able to dispatch a tow truck to help me, I'd still have to pay a penalty fee for their dead battery. He at least had been supportive up until that point so I politely told him how offensive I find that policy and hung up gently.

Meanwhile Hawk had already called AAA for a jump-start. I'd asked her to call on her phone as a Plan B after the first failed attempt with Avis.



The tow truck dispatched by AAA arrived about an hour after Hawk started her call. That's not the fastest help we've ever gotten, but it's good that AAA at least had a contract with a company in Seward, as opposed to somewhere an hour or more away. We passed the time in the car reading news and stuff on our phones. We were parked legally in a parking lot, so among all the places we've ever experienced car trouble, it was one of the least concerning overall. It was just annoying that this happened on vacation and when we were hungry to go get dinner then relax in our hotel room. And for a Sunday evening at dinnertime, an hour wait seems reasonable. The driver even pulled up with what seemed like half his family in the truck with him. 😂

The driver jumped the car. It took a few tries with the ignition to get the engine to catch. The tow driver was unfazed and kept at it. The car came to life. "Keep it running for 20-30 minutes to make sure the battery's recharged," he advised. So we drove around town figuring out where to eat. And Hawk went shopping in a gift shop while I parked outside with the engine running.

Sun all P.M., Fog all A.M., Pizza 4x in 36 Hours

Alaska Travelog #16
At the hotel - Mon, 17 Jun 2024, 10am

The way it's light so late at night here in Alaska is kind of disorienting. Don't get me wrong; it was nice having twilight until 1am when we landed in Anchorage and drove to our hotel. And it's nice not worrying about about finishing our daytime activities outdoors before dark. We'll almost certainly run out of energy before the day runs out of daylight. But the sun not even starting to set until after 10pm throws off my sense of time. It's interesting to learn how many things are aligned to a kind of circadian rhythm. Like, I forget to eat dinner.

I forget to eat dinner. That's certainly not a sentence I ever thought I'd write! While some people I know easily forget to eat, when I haven't eaten in a while my body reminds me approximately every 3 minutes that food is delicious and would fill a void in my stomach. But here with sun not even dropping behind the mountains until 10pm, I've been like, "Woah, it's after 8pm already, I should get dinner!"

Unfortunately the choices for dinner in this small town of Seward are few. There are a handful of restaurants at the low end of the spectrum, dive-y type places serving small-town America staples like burgers, pizza, and chicken fingers with your choice of barbecue sauce or ranch. Then there are high end, or at least high end-looking places with steak and seafood and prices that promise a tab of $50-70 per person after adding a drink, tax, and tip. We're not the spendy-dinner type of people, especially when traveling in small towns where all the food looks kind of suspect, so we've eaten at the dive-y joints. And that— not being disoriented by the sun— is why I've had pizza 4x in 36 hours.

No, I didn't buy pizza 4 times in 36 hours. I bought it two nights in a row for dinner. But each time there were leftovers. And since I have a thrifty streak from childhood I can't quite outgrow (and also the pizza wasn't disgusting) I ate the leftovers for breakfast both yesterday and today.

But hey, back to the midnight sun thing. You'd think that the flip side of midnight sun would be early morning sun. Like, blazing sun preventing sleep at 4am. Well, here in Seward, there's been morning fog. So yay being able to sleep in 'til a morning hour. But boo not being able to get out and enjoy the daylight right away.

Today we're planning to hike up to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Just like yesterday's cruise in the fjords started out with hours of heavy fog that left me uncertain we'd get to see anything, so too does today's fog make me reluctant to head into the park until I see evidence the clouds are starting to burn off. And here it is 10am already... which means the sun's been up— not that we can see it— for almost 6 hours! Well, it's a good thing there's another 13 hours of daylight left for us to go hiking later today. 🤣